Contemporary circus company NoFit State is embarking on a UK tour of their latest outdoor production, an outdoor acrobatics performance featuring only UK-grown bamboo and human bodies. Co-artistic director Tom Rack tells Julia Bottoms about how the project sprouted shoots, and what he hopes audiences will take away from it.
Traditional circus is a transitory, transient experience. It visits, performs, packs up and leaves, leaving only a flattened patch of grass and the fleeting memory of its spectacle. But NoFit State is no ordinary circus, and their newest show Bamboo explores the capacity for circus to reach beyond a short-term experience.
Using only bamboo as apparatus, the show explores its potential as a sustainable material for the future, pushing the boundaries of what circus can be and what it can represent for audiences. Bamboo is directed by Mish Weaver, with co-artistic directors Orit Azaz and Tom Rack, who tells me that this production is fundamentally centred around “creating a show that is really sustainable and really fresh”.
As artists bring bundles of bamboo to an empty stage, the audience watch how – in Rack’s words – “a simple pile of sticks very quickly manifests big structures, six metres high. Structures not on which we perform circus, but just the act of manifesting them involves circus.” Featuring live music from David Insua-Cao (“a one-man band of technical wizardry,” says Rack), the show takes the audience on a meaningful, ambitious and comic journey across an ever-evolving sculptural landscape.
Bamboo sprouted from a series of NoFit State workshops at Bamboo Circus R&D in Spring 2023, focused on experimenting with the phyllostacys species of UK-grown bamboo. Co-created with Imagineer Productions, the show was developed with the support of Arts Council Wales, the Foyle Foundation and Without Walls to subsidise the lengthy research process. As Rack sees it, “Mish is a choreographer, Orit is a kind of dramaturgist, and I’m really into the structures. So the collaboration between the three of us has kind of given us the best of all of possible worlds of backgrounds.”
At the heart of the show is exploring how bamboo is a sustainable material for the future. “Just by using the bamboo as apparatus, all the symbolic heavy lifting is done for us. It’s all implicit, it’s all there on show, normalised, as it should be. That is the really powerful and strong message,” says Rack.
Extremely strong and versatile – yet made of grass – bamboo captures carbon from the atmosphere and can be re-harvested from the same site again and again, creating a constant supply of building material. Moreover, when bamboo breaks, it splits along the shaft and doesn’t entirely snap, its endurance making it a forgiving material for circus artists to work with.
“Bamboo flexes and bends, which is unlike any other circus apparatus,” says Rack. “That has been our really interesting challenge.” NoFit State, he adds, posed themselves these questions: “What circus can we do on bamboo that we couldn’t do otherwise? What does the bamboo offer us? And how can we embrace the fragility, flexibility and organic nature of it?”
An original one-of-a-kind show, Bamboo is a playful celebration of what is possible when humans and the natural world trust each other and work in harmony. “People can enjoy the music, stand back and enjoy the whole picture, or choose to follow one artist’s journey through it. There’s something there for everybody – that’s what circus is good at.”
Promising an enlightening and educational outdoor spectacle suitable for all ages, Tom comments, “We hope the audience are surprised, entertained, amused – shocked, perhaps. Ultimately, I hope a little bit of joy can come to audiences. God help us, we need a little joy in our lives right now…”
NoFit State: Bamboo, Cardigan Castle, Wed 14 + Thurs 15 Aug
Tickets: £9/£6 kids. Info: here
words JULIA BOTTOMS
